The original blogpost...
On a quiet day in the 1990s Science as a professional practice died. It was killed by a deliberate malfeasor who was more concerned with his future celebrity than with conducting his scientific research with the exacting rigor that had marked almost 3 centuries of laboratory professional practice.

And today Science does not exist in any meaningful form. Oh, you can tell someone at a cocktail party that the statement you're making is a scientific fact, and they'll believe you. But there no longer any new avenues of science that support scientific facts.

Sure we can use science to put a man on the moon. But guess what. We haven't put a man on the moon for four decades. So I question that fact of your science.

So if Science died, when did it live? Well, we know precisely the day Science peaked. When Albert Einstein published the special theory of relativity, expressed as E=MC2, that was most profound expression of physics that would ever be made.

However, 24 hours later, Einstein should have been soundly ridiculed for his complete inability to include the graviton in his theory. For in an Einsteinian Universe, you can zoom at light speed from one end of the universe to the other. However, Einstein supplies no force which will hold you to the surface of any planet you happen to land on. And given that I am sitting in a chair as I write this, it's completely obvious Einstein doesn't know what he's talking about.

Also, any grade school student equipped with a prism can instantly transform the speed of a beam of light. Thus completely destroying the only intelligent thing Einstein is credited with formulating.

Here Pink Floyd proves Einstein wrong.. Courtesy Wiki Media Commons

A generation later, E=MC2 was the first principle that would make it possible to develop a military weapon that was used to murder thousands of Japanese, and injure hundreds of thousands more. And although that was not the day Science died, it was the day that Science went from being a rigorous profession with high standards, to be being a conduit for materials research whose sole aim was to develop new technologies that delivered commercial and especially military applications as quickly and cheaply as possible.

The exact day Science died occurred in 1998 when the previously august medical journal The Lancet published a complete work of fiction linking MMR immunization programs to childhood autism. It would take The Lancet a dozen years to admit its incompetence for publishing the article. It has never accepted responsibility for the deaths of all those children whose mothers followed its publishing a deliberately fraudulent paper.Wiki: MMR Vaccine Controversy

After its death, Science was then perverted into a left-wing propaganda device when Dr. Michael Mann and his colleagues decided to fabricate scientific data that would create false evidence of a phenomena generally called global warming. In fact, there's now an entire cottage industry of climate change fakers:

Today science lives on performing parlor tricks, such as the absurd megaproject the Large Hadron Collider. It's a machine which consumes an obscene amount of energy in vacuuming itself out then accelerating particles beyond any speed they would actually travel if they were merely behaving the laws of physics. The project itself is an unspeakable waste of resources. One collision requires 120 Megawatts of power. I live in a Metro area that can get by on 27 megawatts in a heatwave.

The LHC took about a decade to construct, for a total cost of about $4.75 billion, and it costs 5.5 billion to fund annually. It was successful in allegedly creating an image that is purported to be the elusive Higgs Boson, although the ever-supercilious Peter Higgs has quibbled about the particle name. Apparently 10 billion was spent proving his theory, and he's still not happy.

Me, I would have spent 5.5 billion a year, and 120 megawatts of power generating facilities, and helped the world's poor.

Saturday, 13 April 2013

Aquaponics is an awesome mash-up of container-based fish farming (aquaculture) and vegetables grown in a nutrient liquid (hydroponics). The awesome part is that the fish get nutrients from the plants, and the plants get nutrients from the fish's feces. Yes, they are kept alive by symbiotically sharing poo. Very much like a legislative body.

Aquaponics are the leading edge of what is happening in food production today:

It is by definition and design organic

It is available on a locavore basis

It applies the most advanced principles of polyphase agriculture

It can be very energy efficient, using narrow spectrum LED's to stimulate the chloroform process in the plants

It can be very energy efficient, installed in underutilized spaces such as basements which maintain a constant temperature and typically have waste heat available (I'm talking to you, boiler room)

It can be grown 365 days a year, as opposed to the 7 month Canadian seed to harvest cycle

It can even be done at home!

It is almost brilliantly simple. And it is so easy to imagine restaurateurs offering not only their brewpub lager, but salads and fish entrées that were grown on premises. Fresh this very day!

Here's an article on the CBC Hamilton website that describes one such operation.